CHAPTER 1
Now
Bea
My date is giving me the silent treatment. By date, I mean my plus- one to a wedding. I also mean my mom.
She turns the car down a winding road shaded under a canopy of evergreen trees, only specks of dove- gray clouds poking through. An outdoor wedding in April was risky for the Oregon coast.
“Looks like it might rain,” I try.
Nothing. I turn up the volume on the music, and she turns it back down.
“Mom,” I softly chide. “Would you rather just stay home? You don’t need to go to this with me.”
Her lips purse. “Well, I wasn’t actually invited, so my only option is to go as a plus- one,” she huffs.
“It’s the second time Wren and Ellis have gotten married, Mom. I imagine they’re keeping it small. I was surprised I got an invite.” I suck my teeth in frustration. “You didn’t even like the Byrds.”
“I never said anything of the sort!” she lies, affronted. “I thought Ellis’s parents were a little irresponsible, that’s all.”
“Oh, yeah, how irresponsible of them to die young and leave Ellis to raise his siblings.”
“When they were alive, Bea,” she says. “I said that they were sometimes a little irresponsible and a little careless when they were alive. Late to things. Forgot what time the kids were out of school. Let all four of those kids run wild. That is all I have ever said.”
Ah yes. The joys of small- town living. Even when you’re long gone, someone is still talking shit about you and acting like they’re not. I don’t need to let this fight dredge up the fragments of our last one, though. “Whatever you say.”
“That is what I say, dammit.” She takes a few calming breaths. “Besides all that, I show plenty of support to this generation of Byrds. I’m at Wren’s every Sunday.”
This garners her a few points and puts her back in my good graces. Wren’s bakery is actually called Savvy’s, since it previously belonged to her mom, Savannah, but I like that she’s fully embraced it as Wren’s.
I inhale deeply before I try a gentler approach. “I just mean that you don’t have any obligation to go with me to this, Mom. I’ll be okay. I’m fine.” As fine as I can be, at least, in spite of my mom’s verbose opposition to . . . everything I do as of late. Most notably my decision to rent out my house and move into her guesthouse while I get as financially sound as possible before I, hopefully, have a baby. Three months back at home and her frustration with me only seems to grow, rather than the support and acceptance I’d hoped for.
The sigh Mom lets out sounds a thousand years old. “I plan to make sure you have fun.”
Well. We’re off to a good start, aren’t we?
“Your well- being matters as a whole, not just your capacity to carry,” Dr. Neilson had said at our final consultation meeting to discuss the embryo transfer. It’d been abutted by other instructions for before and aftercare, of course. A schedule of shots and medications leading up to a target transfer date, plus some after. Birth control for the month prior to starting any of it. Rest up, stay distracted, just take care of yourself, too. I don’t know why that last remark keeps nagging at me the way it does, but Mom’s comment and everything it implies brings it right back to the surface.
As if I didn’t spend the last year clawing my way out of the worst of my grief to the best of my ability. I’ve read books— books that all said not to make any major decisions for a year, and I’ve given it that. I deleted all my social media, because I couldn’t take coming across another bell- ringing video or the cocktail of rage and elation it generally ignites in me. I’ve adhered to an exercise schedule, I’ve meditated . . . all while working my ass off to save up enough money for IVF. The point of giving up my home for the rest of this year is to continue saving up for everything else. For childcare and medical expenses and time off. To do everything I can possibly do to make this decision with the care it deserves.
I thought I was doing everything right, taking care of myself. But now I have to worry about working in enough fun?
“All you do is work,” Mom goes on. “Six or seven days a week for the last six months straight, at least.”
“Mom. I needed to.”
“No, you didn’t.” She takes a hand off the steering wheel to cut it through the air in a single slice. “But I’m not going to argue with you about that again tonight. I just need to see . . .” She trails off, and I’m horrified when I find her choking back tears. “I just need to see you living, Bea. Living for yourself. I would love to see you dancing. I need to see you smile and laugh.”
She’s said it so fervently, the words thick with emotion, and guilt pushes me low in my seat. Guilt for being alive when Merritt is not. Guilt that I haven’t been able to do what she’s asked yet. Guilt that I’ve worried my mom so much for so long, despite my best efforts.
She’ll come around, I know. This is the way things go between my mom and me. Leslie Marshall is a virtuoso pianist with multiple accolades to her name. She was valedictorian of her high school class before attending Arizona State on a soccer scholarship, where she also met my (biological) father. She completed three of her four years before moving back home to Spunes— single— at six months’ pregnant with me. And while she maintains that she wants for nothing in life, she certainly always wants more for me.
“I just wanted more for you” when I quit violin as a preteen.
“I just wanted more for you” when I left college and registered for hair school.
“I just want more for you” when I told her my plan for IVF. “I want you to have a baby of your own someday.” Which spawned one of the most shocking and ugliest discussions we’ve ever had. Me, shocked because I’d always known my mother to be a radical, open- minded progressive, and yet there I was, arguing with her about adoptive parents and alternative families and how their lack of shared biology did not make them less than.
She, feeling personally attacked by my inability to just “know what she meant.” I shouldn’t have asked her to come with me tonight. Probably, I just should have RSVP’d no. But it’s a distraction, and I was instructed to find some of those. Plus, the people getting remarried this evening have come back from heartbreaks of their own, and maybe I want to see what that looks like.
By the time we pull into the Byrds’ driveway, the mist is in full swing. And by the time I find myself getting out of the car and opening my umbrella, the dread is crashing over me, too.
How could I forget? No matter how hard- won, I don’t see people’s joy and simply feel hope for my own again. I also see all the things Merritt is missing.
We would have consulted each other on our dresses a week ago. Probably would have shopped for new ones together. She would have pretended not to look for Silas the moment we arrived, then sighed dreamily through her nose at the sight of him in a suit. I would have held back a sigh of my own.
This spiral snuck up on me and is cranking into me now, my lungs twisting in my chest.
“I need to use the bathroom,” I say to Mom in a reedy voice, passing her the umbrella and peeling off toward the house before she can respond. I round a corner and grab the first door I see, then launch myself through.
Or, at least, I try to. I smack into a wall of chest and ricochet right back outside instead.
“Easy, girl” comes a man’s rough rumble, like I’m some wild horse he’s guiding into a trot. Two calloused hands grip my upper arms to steady me. I look up, directly into a half- cocked grin in the darkened garage. I flash back to a memory; that same slash of a smile on a dimly lit porch, parting slowly around a joint, tendrils of smoke curling out from its corners while the sounds of college debauchery played in the background.
“Silas,” I say, a quiet gasp.
“Bea,” he says back. He’s bright in the blue spotlight shining on him. A few inches over six feet. Hair caught between brown and blond, eyes that can flash either turquoise or gray depending on the light, and a white smile with imperfections that only add to its charm. Dimples that have worked on everyone he’s ever wielded them on. The sort of bone structure that makes you believe in those one- in- a- million discovery stories. Something like “I was just cleaning the garbage out of my truck at a gas station when this guy gave me his card and said I had a face for movies.”
Absolutely too good- looking to be my type. Too blatantly sexy. Almost clichéd.
— what I’ve been trying to convince myself for years.
My eyes catch on a collection of scars that creep up the strong column of his throat. But then he’s tamping down his expression like my name broke a spell and reminded him he shouldn’t smile around me these days. I mourn it instantly.
“I’m glad you came,” he tells me.
“Yeah,” I force out. “I wouldn’t skip this.” Which is when I think of the things I have skipped, including replying to him all the times he’s reached out since Merritt died. “I’ve, um. I’ve been meaning to get back to you. I’m sorry.”
He slides his hands into his pockets and presses his lips together like he finds this amusing. “No, you haven’t.”
I feel my chin rear back. “What?” I’m still under the gutter while he remains inside the shelter of the garage. I rub my palms up and down my arms where they’ve suddenly gone cold.
“You never meant to get back to me,” he explains with a smirk. “Little rude, Ruby. Don’t you think?”
My mouth drops open, and his arms snap out, lifting me into the garage by my elbows before I know it’s happening. “Sorry I’ve been somewhat preoccupied, Silas,” I say, surprising myself with the bite in it. I don’t bother correcting him on my name. He’s never accepted that Bea is the entirety of it and has almost always called me anything but.
“Ah yes. Wallowing can be a full- time job,” he replies casually. “I admire your commitment to it.”
Oh, this motherfucker. “Uh, I’ve been doing a lot more than wallowing!” I laugh in pure indignation, high- pitched and humorless. The cold is gone, replaced by something fiery.
“Such as?” He widens his stance and starts rifling around the inside of his navy suit jacket, completely unperturbed.
I sputter over a few sounds before I reply, “I’ve been working six days a week, getting my house ready to rent, I moved in with my parents . . .” All things I’m certain his nosy ass knows, since this town has fewer than one thousand people in it and he’s usually the first in everyone’s business. I feel a small thrill when I realize I have at least one update that’ll shock him. I cross my arms and lean on a hip. Let my eyes travel the length of him as he tips up his flask and takes a drink. “And trying to get pregnant.”
He chokes, and it’s supremely satisfying. He’s still coughing and pounding his fist on his chest when I brush past him and head deeper into the garage toward the house. “Glad we got caught up, Si.”
“’Fraid I’m still a little behind, Red,” I hear him wheeze. I turn to throw him a look over my shoulder and find him reaching for me again. He takes his hand back and coughs into it. “Save me a dance?” he says.
More memories shuffle through my brain like cards in a deck. A red- orange boutonniere, his palm over my pulse, sea- green sequins catching in the lights as their wearer hurried away. Merritt with her beautiful complexion and her incredible chocolate hair, crying angry tears. Merritt in a hospital bed, applying makeup to her colorless face, smiling shyly as Silas handed her a bouquet, her downy head backlit by the sun.
Silas in a hospital bed, too, a collection of wires and wrappings, a ventilator inflating his lungs. Him in that same hospital bed, up and cracking jokes and making the staff blush.
So much history. Too much history and not enough time. Life, death, happiness, despair.
“Say yes, Ruby,” he adds, softer now. “I promise to make you mad again, if that’ll help.”
I study his perfectly imperfect face, the bump on his nose he earned his sophomore year when he took a baseball to it. I should have figured he’d annoyed me on purpose. He’s always had a read on me like that.
“It did help,” I admit. Felt good to feel something other than everything else I’ve been fighting off for all these months, however fleeting. “I’ll save you a dance.”
The whole exchange leaves me calmer. Like letting my emotions lash out allowed me to settle back down into something functional. I find my mom and offer her a smile when I emerge from the house a few minutes later, and for once, the palpable hope in her grin doesn’t set off my guilt.
We filter into the small stable that the Byrds have set up for the ceremony on account of the rain, and it’s beautiful and lovely and so very them. Origami birds hang from the ceiling, flowers and hay litter the floors, and a couple of horses stick their heads out of their stalls to watch it all take place alongside a small group of us from town.
Admittedly, I do my best to tune out quite a bit. I’m worried if I let myself happy cry, it’ll open the floodgates for everything else. But I am delighted and surprised when I see Silas at the head of the aisle, officiating the whole thing. I find myself watching him speak when Wren and Ellis are there, staring at one another with a lifetime’s worth of love in their eyes. I watch Silas’s mouth move, even as I actively try not to hear what he’s saying, like I might brace myself against the swell of emotion his speech brings.
My hold on myself slips at a few points. First, when I hear him say, “My brother has saved my life in the literal sense, more than once, so when I fell off a mountain in a ball of fire, all that went through my head was holding on long enough for him to find me. It never once occurred to me that he wouldn’t.”
And again, when he says, “What is bravery, if not hope in action?”
I know it’s about Wren and Ellis, and how hoping against their own odds is what brought them together in the first place, even after having a baby as teenagers, and what brought them back together after they dropped Sam off at college last summer. But of course I make it about Merritt, how much hope she’d had and how it helped her brave the worst of things, even in death.
But this is also when Silas’s eyes find me, and the big bastard winks. He winks like it’s all some smug act and not the most earnest tribute he’s given in his life. Either way, that wink puts me on solid ground again. One of my salty tears dissolves on my tongue when it meets my silent chuckle.
I could use more of this feeling, whatever it is. Like relief, but sweeter. I am suddenly glad that I came today, even if it’s just a distraction and everything else is still waiting for me outside of tonight.
I’m even looking forward to a dance.
Copyright © 2026 by Tarah DeWitt